b'Designed riparian buffers improve functions and uptakeStutter M1 and Wilkinson M11The James Hutton Institute, Aberdeen, AB15 8QH, UKRiparian zones are critical locations, at landscape to field scales, for management to enhanceenvironmental functions and benefits. Riparian buffer strips between agricultural or developed land and watercourses can help alleviate pressures on the water environment and provideessential ecosystem services if correctly designed and sited. Although riparian buffers are amongst the most widely adopted diffuse pollution measures, their current adoption falls short of realising their full potential. For example, sediment or nutrient capture in surface runoff may at best be spatially variable, but for land where artificial subsurface drainage pathways exist, their functionality will be highly limited. Such uncertainty and lack of guidance for what works bestand where, limits effective uptake.This talk looks at the concepts of measures that can be applied in the riparian space that act to enhance functions (e.g. pollutant trapping and retention) required to buffer against nearby agricultural field practices or to restore degraded functionality of river corridors (e.g. restoring canopy shading combating temperature extremes). The core concept is that innovative use of the riparian space, via designed features coherent with location, can reduce uncertainties in the way that buffers function for water quality and other benefits. The range of options includesvegetation change, tree planting, mini-wetlands intercepting drains, blind ditches, sculpted channel form, raised bunds and leaky flood water holding areas. To examine the interactions of design, siting and the context of place we introduce a range of designs aspects, examples of packages of measures that can be combined and demonstration examples of integratedbuffer zone approaches. These are considered against contexts of form of the field-ripariantransition-channel zone, soil water table and differing pollutant pathways. We present anargument for moving away from linear fixed width buffers towards designed, spatially-targeted packages of measures to improve outcomes and, in-turn, uptake.13'